Not Exactly the Doomed Romance of the Century
by Gigabomb
Summary: Jiraiya x Orochimaru, pastfic. In which Jiraiya fails to be any good at spicing up his sex life.


For someone who acted so freaking weird most of the time, Orochimaru had turned out to be surprising vanilla in the bedroom. Jiraiya had pushed him on this once—after Orochimaru had walked into Jiraiya's apartment after a mission and frozen at the sight of the handcuffs on the bedside dresser before teleporting out without a word—because so few things unnerved Orochimaru, it was just one of those things that had to be known.

In reply, Orochimaru had sent him a particularly withering look that he had picked up from Tsunade at some point and hissed at him something about getting enough excitement and unexpected surprises on missions and really not needing more of those during his downtime, so Jiraiya had let the whole thing drop. So Orochimaru wasn't particularly adventurous in bed. So what? In truth, the handcuffs hadn't been such a great idea anyway—shinobi and being tied up was rarely a good mix—and if Orochimaru wasn't so keen on the whole concept of exploring new and thrilling ways to achieve an orgasm, well, he still gave the best head like ever.

Jiraiya had consoled himself with this thought for the first year or so of their not-relationship—and it wasn't, because no relationship in the history of time had ever started because two guys were pissed off at their crush-since-childhood, best friend forever, and longtime teammate (Jiraiya for the first, Orochimaru for the second, and both of them for the last) for her choice of boyfriend, and decided while drunk one evening that they'd punish her for her poor taste by having (in retrospect) extremely bad sex behind the bar.

So it wasn't a relationship, even if it had been going on for a while, and therefore Jiraiya had no actual reason to expect kink. Kink was supposed to be reserved for high-class whores and couples married for thirty years who were trying to spark up their love lives again, not two jounin in their early twenties who had known each other since they were six, hated each other then and in truth, didn't like each other much more now.

It was kind of a trust issue. Jiraiya would have been offended, except Orochimaru didn't trust anyone enough to be tied up by them, including Tsunade and with the possible exception of Sarutobi-sensei, and after that particular thought led somewhere weird and dark and the stuff of nightmares, Jiraiya had spent ten minutes gagging before going out to drown his sorrows in overpriced gin. With Orochimaru. Who he then had sex with again, because fortunately the drowning thing totally worked, at least long enough that the throwing up was caused by a minor case of alcohol poisoning and not by a visual consisting of Orochimaru, their teacher, and the horizontal tango over the Hokage's desk.

Still, not all kinks included handcuffs and teacher/student fantasies from hell (and that was one role-playing idea Jiraiya knew he was never going to bring up), and if Orochimaru was vanilla, he wasn't that vanilla.

Which was how Jiraiya had come upon the idea of the blindfold.

Orochimaru had agreed, mostly because Jiraiya got him drunk first. One day, Jiraiya would analyze why practically all their sexual encounters had to be precluded by liquor (he'd even write a book about it, though it would be highly stylized and reworked to the point that not even Tsunade would recognize the original inspiration), but not today, thank God.

So about an hour later, there they were in Jiraiya's apartment, Orochimaru weaving on his feet and staring at the wall looking myopic and Jiraiya fumbling with his hitai-ate headband to make an impromptu blindfold. It was about ten minutes after he had figured out how to secure the headband so that it didn't yank at Orochimaru's hair—ten embarrassing, not at all arousing minutes after—that Jiraiya realized this was going to be another failure in his quest to expand his sexual horizons; even drunk, Orochimaru was just too damned good of a shinobi for a blindfold to matter.

"Now we're walking through your living room… steer me a little more to the left, Jiraiya, or I'm going to hit my shin on your coffee table."

After a few more minutes of this—normally it wouldn't have taken so long to forge a pass through his own apartment, but he wasn't much more steady on his feet than Orochimaru and was having trouble getting them past his kitchen island—Jiraiya threw up his hands in frustration and leaned back against the fading flowery wallpaper that blanketed the walls of his apartment (he'd never bothered to remove it, even though Tsunade teased him about it every time she came over; paint was expensive), feeling irked and a little depressed about how poorly things were going. "You know what? Forget it. This isn't going to work. You can't even _pretend_ that being unable to see incapacitates you in any way." Okay, maybe not that drunk. He wasn't normally able to navigate his way around a word like 'incapacitates' at anything less than completely stone sober.

Orochimaru pulled the headband up onto a higher point on his head and glared at him. "You're the one who wanted to do this."

Jiraiya snorted. "And since when have I been a fount of good ideas? This was just a total waste."

Even in the poor lighting (decent shinobi he may have been, electrician he was not, and it had seemed like an extravagance to hire one to fix the wiring… God, maybe Tsunade was right and he was kind of cheap), Jiraiya could see Orochimaru's eyes narrow, and there was no mistaking the frostiness in his old teammate's voice when Orochimaru said, "Fine, then. I'll leave." He turned to go.

Mentally, Jiraiya cursed. Sober enough to manage the word 'incapacitates,' too drunk to know when it would have been a good idea to keep his mouth shut. Shit, he hadn't meant to imply he didn't want sex _at all_. "No… Orochimaru, wait!"

Orochimaru stopped, but didn't bother turning back around. "What?"

Jiraiya cast his eyes around the kitchen frantically, knowing very well that his kitchen had, well, nothing in the way of interesting sex toys. Then a miracle occurred. His eyes alighted on the freezer, and stayed there. "Icecubes!"

_Now _Orochimaru looked at him, one eyebrow cocked in bemusement. "Icecubes."

"Yeah!" Jiraiya walked over to the freezer and pulled out an icecube tray. "I read… somewhere… um… different temperatures or something… we can use these in sex! I think."

Orochimaru still looked like he wasn't sure whether or not Jiraiya had acquired brain damage in the past sixty seconds, but at least he wasn't making to leave again. "That sounds dubious."

Jiraiya leered, suddenly feeling as if his feet were on sure ground for the first time that evening. An interested Orochimaru was almost as good as a horny Orochimaru, as the former almost invariably led to the latter. "Well… you never know until you try."

It was the worst line ever. Somehow, it still led to sex. Sometimes it was nice to have a friend as hard up as he was.


End file.
